Welcome to the beta version of Shelfari’s new Book Detail pages!
These pages are editable by the community, so please contribute! Click here to learn more about this feature. We’d love to hear your feedback.
Description
After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children are all making catastrophes of their own lives. Enid however, has her heart set on one last family Christmas.
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Summary
As the aging patriarch slips into dementia, a Midwestern family prepares to gather for ‘one last christmas’ in the parents small home town of ‘St Jude’ (The patron Saint of lost causes). Familial pathos and melodrama is writ large.
Memorable Quotes
-
“The Universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.”
-
““Take it easy”. The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom ‘easygoing’ was a compliment…. ‘take it easy’ was the watchword of these super friendly young men, the token of their over familiarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.””
-
“Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts…. Gary wished that all further migration <could> be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.”
-
“The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”
-
““Then she moved to New York and embarked on the long process of sleeping with every dishonest, casually sadistic, terminally uncommitted really gorgeous guy in the borough of Manhattan””
-
““”Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia…, and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy.””
-
““Interesting how eager he’s been to be alone, how hatefully clear he’d made this to everyone around him; and how, having finally closeted himself, he sat hoping that someone would come and disturb him. He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.””
-
““On the second day in St Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it.””
-
““The disappointment on Enid’s face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments.””
-
““This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.””
- Show all quotations from this book (warning: contains spoilers)
First Sentence
THE MADNESS of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Jonathan Franzen (Author)
Popular Tags
See all 50 tagsBooks with Additional Background Information
List the books that contain additional information about this book.
If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this page or if there are sections that you would like us to add, please let us know.
